Tagged with biking …

Feb 18 2012
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school, sports, vancouver

biking and the inevitable decay of all flesh

I neglected to ride my bike to school on Wednesday. No, not neglected. I chose not to, because I wanted to finish the book I was reading on the bus. Which worked out, but man oh man I get frustrated waiting for overcrowded buses to get me home when I could be moving. I decided to bike on Friday to my 8am class to make up for the frustration (even though my schedule works well for comfortable Friday busing).

Part of not biking on Wednesday was because I failed to make it the whole way up the hill on Monday. Now, I was never really in shape as a younger man, so I don’t have any real notion of being past my peak. I have friends who complain about being sore after playing sports that they used to do without ill effects. I have always had ill effects from sports, so I don’t have some better time to compare things to. Due solely to never pushing my physical limits when I was younger, I still feel like I have room to improve my strength and fitness and whatever. Anything I did yesterday I should be able to do tomorrow.

So on Monday when I had to stop and walk my bike up the last 10 metres to my normal “pause to survey the city” point, it sucked. And because it sucked I was scared that maybe that had been it, and I’d never be able to climb that hill again. But on Friday at sometime after 7am I did climb it in my normal fashion, and it was a bit of a relief.

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Feb 10 2012
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school, travel, vancouver

what passes for contemplative geography

One of my profs is in Toronto for the iConference this week (where people from the iSchools get together and do informationy kinds of things) so I didn’t have to go to my normal 8am class today, which I appreciated, but it’s making me feel like school is entirely an illusion. And since that means unlike every other library school student in the history of the world apparently, I have lots of free time (still being unemployed) I got a good pile of stuff done the last couple of days (most of it very boring, like catching up on my book reviews).

Looking west
This afternoon though, I went walking up the seawall and looked at the cargo ships sitting out in the Burrard Inlet (or Salish Sea or possibly all the way out to the Strait of Georgia). I like being able to do that. It’s some sort of connection to the world in terms of physical objects that’ll be crossing the ocean and I get to see them as they leave. I guess a lot of them just have oil or some other planet-killing thing in them. Or they’re just going down to Seattle and not on a real voyage at all. But still.

Another thing I love here is how the mix of hills and water give you great views of the city. When I bike home from school I get to fly down the terrible hill I’ve fought my way up already once that day, and there’s this gap created by English Bay that lets me see all the lights of downtown, and up in North Vancouver and way out east. I don’t have to pedal and I can just look at the city as I speed down into it again (well, into Kits, but close enough). And then when I’m climbing up over the Burrard Bridge you feel right in and above all the lights. It’s these bits of perspective before getting swallowed up in the urban canyons that I love.

I don’t know if I’m staying in Vancouver past my degree’s end, but if I leave these are things I’ll miss.

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Jan 25 2012
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vancouver

feeling like a real cyclist again

I’ve gotten to the zone where I can bike up the bad hill (with a bit of a breather break 3/4 of the way up) even in the rain. It wasn’t pouring today, so it was infinitely nicer out than last week with all the snow and slush (which I didn’t bike through). It’s starting to feel normal to bike, not like some thing I have to psyche myself up for, even on a mildly rainy day.

My rain pants (which I’ll bring the next time I go to New Zealand for tramping so as not to get made fun of) do keep a lot of heat in though, so whatever pants I wear under them are not soaked from rain just damp from sweat. I might have to leave some pants here and change my (below rain gear) cycling wardrobe.

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Jan 04 2012
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library, school, vancouver

cycling to school can now begin

I kind of wanted to bike to school today, but didn’t because I couldn’t find my red flashing light. There isn’t very much of me that wants to be riding around in the dark without something telling vehicles not to hit my fragile little body. Now I’ve got that sorted so tomorrow I shall set out to regain my fitness. Be prepared for a couple of weeks of me complaining mightily about this city’s stupid hills.

Classes began today and I think this Children’s Literature course will be good. And I know more people than I’d expected to be in the Management class. As it stands right now, since I have to take a course and a bit in the summer anyway, my data visualization class which starts tomorrow is a provisional class. It’d be some interesting stuff, but I’m interested in a bunch of the summer offerings so dropping it wouldn’t be too terrible.

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Jul 31 2011
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australia, travel, vancouver

gallivanting on train and bike

On Saturday I got to go on an adventure. Holly needs a bike to get to work. It’s a half-hour walk that’s really crappy at the end of a twelve-hour day running around a kitchen lifting 20kilos of butter at a time, smashing your fingers under said butter and getting yelled at/needing to dodge the occasional cupcake being thrown by the chef. (I’m leaving out the story about the panicky bike-borrowing that happened this week, because I’m not sure if she’s got it in her queue of blog posts.)

So she went on Gumtree and found a used bike for a decent price. You can get a new bike from KMart for less, but she wanted a bike that was actually going to be good to ride, that was light and fast. Having bought such a bike in Vancouver last fall, I know what she means.

Anyway, this bike was out in Woolooware, across Botany Bay from where we live (yes, that Botany Bay), so I took a couple hours from my Saturday to take the train out there. I like how these suburban trains work here. If you live in a little town like Woolooware you’re still only half an hour from downtown Sydney. I don’t know if that’s what it’s like on the Go Train in Toronto, but this feels even more extensive than Vancouver’s Skytrain network.

I got to Woolooware and phoned the guy to get directions through the town to his house. Now, we have trouble with Australian accents, Holly and I. I especially find it difficult when it comes to names, since you can’t necessarily just figure it out from the context when there’s a word you don’t get. Case in point: Woolooware is down the Illawara Line though Holly’s best guess was Yellow Wire. We just looked at a map until we could piece something sensible together and happily it worked. For getting to the guy’s house I knew his street had a F in the middle and vowel sounds on either side. Maybe an R in there somewhere. It took a bit of getting lost but eventually I made it to Alfred street and went “That makes sense!”

I brought the bike back to Central Station on the train and then rode it home from there. My first time riding on the left hand side of the street. I remembered to be in the left lane, but I kept on trying to hug the right hand side of it. It was a little hard on my nerves but I got the bike home safely, and missed my bike back in Van City (but not that hill up to UBC).

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Nov 20 2010
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comics, games, school, vancouver, whining, writing, 中国

i guess it’s saturday today?

I think I left the house yesterday. Yes I did. I bought some groceries. And the day before, I’d been to school and off visiting libraries for homework purposes and then to Kerry’s for board- and party- gaming. We played Settlers and the endgame got bogged down as it sometimes does. I skipped out on Dominion because I was recuperating from Settlers, where I’d made the classic mistake of jumping to a lead too soon and not being able to close it out before getting ganged upon. Selah. I’d been pretty lucky in my early resources.

The rest of the weekend’s been homework. I’m almost done the actual Subject Headings part of the last assignment for one of my classes (leaving the essay about the experience still to go). I’m giving a selection of my comics collection subject headings to describe what they’re about. I’m not breaking down the series like DMZ or Transmetropolitan into specific volumes and giving them each their own headings. It still got kind of out of hand (I have a lot of fun making lead-in terms). So far I’ve done it all in a text document without any layout type stuff so I don’t have a clue how big it would be on paper and that’s probably for the best.

I woke up to snow, which made it a good day to stay inside and work. It’s fine when the snow is on the mountains and I can see it up there when the clouds are high enough, but I’m not a big fan of it being here in my part of town. I came to Vancouver for rain and being able to bike to school all winter without ice spikes on my tires. Three days before I bike again.

One of the things I’m looking forward to about China (beyond just being with Holly and eating baked goods and watching movies Holly needs to see and not having assignments that need doing and being a somewhat useful dishwasher for the woman I love) is getting some writing work done. I’ve been terrible about it this semester. I know that so much of it has to be just sitting down and making the time to do it. Holly’ll be working when I’m there, so I’ll be filling my time with working too. I did this when I went to visit Nanjing in 2008, all spending my mornings writing while Holly was working. I got a lot done. Hopefully I can repeat myself, at least effort-wise.

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Nov 10 2010
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sports, vancouver

my racing heart says whee!

For the second time in two days I put my bike’s brake to the test on my way home. Yesterday it was because of a car not paying attention as he cruised through one of those traffic-calmed intersections with the obstruction in the centre. I don’t know exactly what the protocol is but I feel like he was the crosser of my street so I had the right of way. Probably hard to say. My brake worked and so did his and nobody got hurt. He got scowled at so his feelings may have been hurt. I apologize for nothing.

Today I was coming down the big hill on 10th going down to Alma. It’s an awesome hill, with a view of the city and no crazy traffic jumping out into your way. I’m always careful because there’s a traffic light at the bottom so I don’t just let myself go pell-mell, but I get up to a good gravity-fuelled pace. Once past the traffic signal tonight though I was approaching the next one (still at a good clip) where there was the line of stopped traffic and a line of parked cars.

“That’s fine,” I thought. “Plenty of room between the two.”

And then another car, an Audi, joins the traffic line, but a lot closer to the parked cars.

“Okay, I’ll slow down a bit to get through that gap. Hm. That gap looks a lot smaller than it should.”

And then I realize that the Audi is completely blocking my path through the traffic and I was not going to be able to get through, so I slam on my brake. Skid skid skid because the ground’s still wet from all the rain that was fucking miserable to bike through last night (which is normal Vancouver weather, I have to remember). While I was skidding I debated whether it was better to hit the parked car or the Audi, decided on the Audi who’d blocked my path, but managed to stop with more than a foot to spare.

I cussed out the Audi driver, but he didn’t notice because the traffic line had already begun moving. I hope it wasn’t you in that car.

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